Progress report 2025-03-08

General Site Updates
1

I have been talking a lot about server migration and making it ready without disclosing many details. So this thread aims to remedy that.

What have I been working on?

Backups

The most important thing is backups so that has been getting 90% of my attention.
The main goal of mine is minimizing friction in restoring the server. It should only take a few minutes to restore the server. My NixOS module at this point can now restore the server in just a few minutes, and has point in time recovery. Meaning at most we might lose 1 minute of data. I have made this so frictionless I could deploy a full new server and restore from backup in just 10 minutes or less.

Moving storage

Planning on where to move the files took a lot of research, testing, and price calculations. I believe the best option for our needs is 1 of 2 places, im leaning on the 1st option.

  1. Our own storage - This means storing the files on a server we own. This will be cheaper than the second option, but not as portable, and would make migrations down the line more difficult. This would be DMCA ignoring storage.

  2. Cloudflare R2 - This is relatively cheap compared to other options and integrates into technologies down further in this post. Much more portable, but costs much more than the 1st option and not DMCA ignoring

  • Cloudflare
  • Our own storage
0 voters

CDN

This is by far the biggest cost for the server, and I can remove it entirely, by switching to cloudflare. This is why cloudflare is an option for storage as the money saved from this would allow me to put more money into the storage/hosting costs. We will be using this regardless of the storage we end up with.

So now what

These are the main blockers for the migration. I have most problems solved at this point and the migration is appearing on the horizon. I will be scheduling downtime for 4 days sometime in the near future. The downtime might be shorter than that if everything goes smooth. I don’t anticipate the downtime actually taking 4 days.

7 Likes
2

When you do, please establish a secondary channel of communication in case things go south :pray:

I’ve mentioned a Discord channel in the past but whatever works so we are not left in the dark if something goes wrong.

I don’t remember why it was about a year ago that the site was down for some time and I was unable to recover my password when the site was back up. I was lucky I could reach you through Patreon but I was afraid I could lose my account.

3

I know some community discords exist. I’m only in one.
would love some invites to some others so I can communicate in those.

4

Me too. I’m in none, I didn’t even know there were some.

5

I guess I can start one to be like the “official” server.

8 Likes
6

Without know the pricing and funding situation, and how big the difference may be. The only deciding factor we have to go off on is the DMCA situation.

I would imagine, self provided storage and hardware in general would also mean completely self managed and maintained by ourselfes. Meaning bigger time investments down the line? Espacially if there happens to be a hardware defect?

10min disaster recovery is incredibly fast, assuming the backup isn’t part of that. Not sure if this site needs to be restored within 10 minutes.

Alternative “official” comunication methods would be nice, even if just to see a status update in case something went wrong, or progress reports on migration or other maintenance tasks. Most basic solution, without third party services, is probably just a mailing option utilizing the email used for the accounts, with opt-in, or opt-out options.

And Discord or other services for more general communication.

7

The backup is a part of that.

We now have a discord (as per banner topic)